Comments on: Scan and Shoot – Resolution

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:18:21 +0000

Adjusting screen resolution to make things bigger or smaller on a Windows OR Mac system is just a recipe for degraded images and eye strain. Particularly since the article suggests 1024 x 768 as a potential candidate for a monitor that usually displays 1680 x 1050. That’s a whole new aspect ratio! Welcome to a world of blurry AND stretchy.

I’d like to see this article re-written, but by someone who has a stronger grasp of screen resolutions, pixel density and scaling.

By: Steve Hollasch

Steve Hollasch — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:40:59 +0000

What resolution should I use for scanning old 4×6 prints? I just want to digitize these prints for a slideshow to give to my kids on DVD.

Is this DVD for posterity, or will they have access to the originals in the future? What seems high-res today will seem low-res in the future.

Will your slideshow use the technique of displaying a slowly-moving window over a zoomed-in photo? If so, then you’ll need to use an image resolution higher than their monitors.

In general, I’d make the slideshow at native resolution, as long as the DVD can hold them all, and the slideshow software can manage them. Downsize the images if the collection is larger than the 4.7GB of a DVD or if your software can’t handle them.

I suspect you don’t need to downsize the images at all.

By: Kim Groth

Kim Groth — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:28:11 +0000

… and for the next time. Keep away from topics you don’t understand. Some of the comments above point pretty severe faults out.

By: Kim Groth

Kim Groth — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:21:47 +0000

Ouch!
Please!
Do not adjust your screen resolution in order to get your icon to be the right size (that’s a windows thing). Rightclick (or option-click) on your desktop and select “show view options”. Adjust your icon size and turn that screen res back up again!

Great article by the way.

By: John Gilbert

John Gilbert — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:36:22 +0000

I’ve met far too many people who set their LCD monitor to something less than the native resolution. This bugs me because everything gets blurry. This technique would work fine in the days of multisync CRTs, which have no fixed pixel grid, but not for flat-screen technology. Setting your display to high-resolution and high-ppi can cause issues with web pages, though, where text is defined in points while images are defined in pixels.

For the same reason, I don’t understand why middle-of-the-line HDTVs have a native resolution of 1024×768 (or 1366×768). 768 doesn’t match or divide cleanly into of the native TV formats of 1080, 720 or 480. Every single picture format will have to be resampled to the native TV resolution, thereby degrading the picture quality.

Lastly, older Mac displays were designed to be roughly 72ppi based on the graphic arts standard of points and picas. A 19″ monitor had a fixed resolution of 1024×768, and a 21″ was 1152×870. These days, monitors generally have upwards of 100ppi. Saying that your monitor is 72ppi based on it being a Mac clearly demonstrates a misunderstanding of the concept of pixels-per-inch and dots-per-inch.

By: Shirley Schweizer

Shirley Schweizer — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:50:52 +0000

What resolution should I use for scanning old 4×6 prints? I just want to digitize these prints for a slideshow to give to my kids on DVD.

By: Steve Hollasch

Steve Hollasch — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:18:17 +0000

Ugh, I couldn’t disagree more. 100dpi is still far too low, in my opinion. I personally can’t wait until we finally get 200dpi monitors for normal work. We don’t settle for pixellated print, why do we settle for low-resolution screens (and then complain about how painful it is to read documents on a monitor)?

The crux of his error is the statement that “too many pixels” will make his display elements too small. Far better to set the highest resolution your setup can handle, and then fix up the display elements. In Windows, this means going into the advanced display properties and setting up the ruler correctly, so you that your monitor now actually display elements at their proper size. In fact, 10pt text will now render at … ten points! Then scale up your icons and text to a level you want. You now have a high-resolution display with elements sized to your liking.

Crippling your display, and then yoru scanned art and everything else in your workflow, is just batty.

By: Fletch

Fletch — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:01:36 +0000

“Why the odd title, you say”

I did!

Then I read on a realised why the need for the odd title. Its because if the title was a bit more descriptive nobody would read the article! I didn’t reach the end.

By: michael

michael — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 01:36:08 +0000

There’s the old saw about 72 DPI screen resolution for a Mac. Look at specs for current models. There’s not a Mac sold, and since monitor sizes are pretty uniform, few PCs that have a resolution lower than 100 DPI.

By: Lisa

Lisa — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 18:21:48 +0000

I appreciated some details of this article that despite scanning many images for various uses in the past five years, I had somehow missed, like why hadn’t I thought of working backward to get the file size I wanted before???

HD’s may be “cheap” relatively, but I cannot afford them now. My 6 year old computing power processes large scans and large files so slowly that they can be timed with a calendar at times. So while the capability is out there for “big as possible” it is unattainable for me at this point, so it’s do the best with what you’ve got.

Thanks for the tips.